Marshall Murdock

Marshall Murdock (12 April 1936-5 October 2011) was a bureaucrat of the United States. He was placed in charge of the operation to find out if there were still prisoners-of-war in Vietnam after the Vietnam War's end in 1975, and although he originally planned to forsake the POWs, John Rambo intimidated him into continuing the operation in 1985.

Biography
Marshall Murdock was from Kentucky in the United States. He later claimed that he served in the 2nd Battalion of the US 3rd Marine Regiment of the US Marine Corps at Kontum in 1966 during the Vietnam War, but his claims were untrue, as they were stationed at Kudsank instead. In 1985, he was appointed as the head of a secret mission in Vietnam to find out if there were any prisoners-of-war still in Vietnamese custody. Murdock hoped that the prisoner-of-war camp that he targeted for reconaissance was empty (the prisoners were moved to different camps for crop harvesting every month), because if the government found out that there were no POWs in the camp, the issue could be swept under the rug. His assistant, Colonel Samuel Trautman, recruited his old pupil John Rambo for the task, and Murdock sent him to a camp that he had escaped from in 1971. However, Murdock's plan did not go as expected, and Rambo found a cave full of POWs. He fought his way out of the Vietnamese camp, and when Trautman's extraction chopper was about to pick up Rambo, Murdock told his mercenary helicopter pilot Ericson to abort the mission, as he came with a POW. If POWs were discovered, the United States would want to invade Vietnam again and start a new war in the region. Rambo was left to fight for himself. One day, while in captivity, Rambo warned Murdock on the radio that he would come for him next.

After he escaped from captivity with other POWs in a Mi-24 Hind helicopter and returned to "Wolf Den", his command center, Rambo shot up the center and encountered Murdock. He intimidated him into continuing the search for POWs, or else he would be back for him. He continued the search for the 2,500 MIA US servicemen in Vietnam after this threat.